“Hey, remember the pandemic economy? How could you not, right? In early 2020, millions of people lost their jobs in the blink of an eye, through no fault of their own. In the United States, their subsequent attempts to get help from the government overwhelmed unemployment offices across the country, revealing the system to be fundamentally broken. The infrastructure was bad, the benefits insufficient, and the entire scheme next to impossible to navigate.
And then, something remarkable happened: The federal government stepped in to shore things up. It added extra dollars to state unemployment benefits to make sure people could get by and pay their bills. It expanded the pool of people who were eligible for benefits, so workers such as freelancers and contractors could access them, too. While far from perfect, the extra efforts to help the unemployed made a real difference in people’s lives and played a part in the country averting a deeper and longer recession.
It felt, for a while, like maybe there would be momentum to finally address the issues in America’s unemployment system. So many people had experienced first-hand just what a disaster it was on a massive scale, from outdated administrative systems to inadequate benefits. It seemed obvious that this hybrid state-federal program that had left so much discretion up to individual states just didn’t work.
And then … America’s UI setup didn’t really get fixed, because it never does.”
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“As workers stare down the barrel of another potential recession — and the layoffs that would accompany it — the problems that dogged unemployment insurance before the pandemic, many of which have persisted for decades, remain. Most of the momentum to repair the system has dissipated.
Congress and the White House allocated $2 billion to the Department of Labor in 2021 to try to help states update their unemployment systems, combat fraud, and promote equitable access to benefits. But that funding and the accompanying efforts can only go so far, and they are aimed at administrative fixes, not policy fixes. The benefit amount a worker is entitled to, how long the benefits last, and the requirements to get them largely depend on which state that worker lives in. Many states are still digging themselves out from under the last crisis. Given the narrative that has taken hold around unemployment during this most recent economic recovery — that UI kept people out of the workforce, that too much government assistance contributed to inflation — it’s not clear what kind of appetite would exist in Congress to help workers if and when another recession hits.”
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“The point of unemployment insurance is to replace income for people who have lost their jobs and keep them attached to the labor market. It’s meant to be a support for the broader economy in times of economic downturn, too, and keep consumer spending going. If I lose my job and can’t pay my rent, it is a problem for me and for my landlord and for the sandwich guy I no longer buy from down the street.”
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“UI is financed through state and federal payroll taxes that are supposed to cover both administrative systems and the benefits themselves. Many states have kept those taxes quite low, leaving the system chronically underfunded and resulting in luck-of-the-draw situations for workers applying for UI, depending on where they live.
The average weekly benefit paid out in regular unemployment insurance nationwide was about $385 in the 12 months ending in September. But if you look at Mississippi, for example, the average benefit is in the low $200 range, while it’s now above $600 for Washington state.
These benefits do not move with inflation, either.”
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“Many UI offices are understaffed, are still dealing with pandemic-era backlogs, and are using outdated technologies to administer benefits. Or, they’ve updated their technologies and they’re intentionally designed to make the whole thing harder for workers to navigate, or the update was just bad.”
“A.B. 2098, which threatens to punish physicians for sharing COVID-19 “misinformation” with their patients. The law, which is scheduled to take effect on January 1, defines “misinformation” as advice “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus”—an open invitation to suppression of constitutionally protected speech.”
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” The new law..makes physicians subject to discipline for sharing their honest opinions regarding COVID-19 if the medical board thinks they deviate from the “scientific consensus,” a term the law does not define. That nebulous standard poses a due process problem, since the law does not give doctors fair notice of which conduct it reaches. It also poses a free speech problem, since it encourages self-censorship.”
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“While some unconventional opinions may amount to quackery, others may ultimately be vindicated. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conventional wisdom on subjects such as intubation of patients, the utility of cloth face masks, isolation periods, and the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing virus transmission has shifted repeatedly in response to emerging evidence.
In addition to violating doctors’ freedom of speech, A.B. 2098 undermines that discovery process. It tells skeptical physicians to keep their mouths shut, lest they endanger their licenses and livelihoods by candidly sharing their opinions.”
“The pandemic was a mass death event. It was also a very messy one for determining the effects of particular public policy interventions on COVID transmission, death, and economic performance. It’ll take years of research to get anywhere close to definitively answering big questions about what policies worked and what didn’t.”
“the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released new data showing a dramatic decline in test scores among American 9-year-olds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data indicate a devastating learning loss among American schoolchildren, marking the largest decline in reading scores since 1990, and the first ever recorded drop in mathematics scores.”
“the US was one of only two among 21 selected similar wealthy countries — along with Israel — in which life expectancy continued to decline last year. While most countries suffered hundreds of thousands of untimely deaths during the first year of Covid-19, once people began to get vaccinated, life expectancies for almost all the 21 countries either stayed the same or began to rise again, many up to their pre-pandemic levels.
The US started off with lower pre-Covid life expectancies than other rich countries like South Korea, France, and Australia. It has been the case for decades that the United States spends exorbitant amounts on health care, yet has worse health outcomes than comparable countries. Even before the pandemic, people in the US faced the opioid epidemic, gun violence, and higher chronic disease rates than people in other rich countries.”
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“Lack of health access and a robust public health care system exacerbated Covid-19’s effects, said Noreen Goldman, a professor of demography and public affairs at Princeton University. The lack of national coordination to address the pandemic, and lower vaccination rates, said Goldman, have also been a factor in outcomes being worse in the US than other comparable countries.
Young people were dying more from Covid-19 in 2021 than 2020, said Theresa Andrasfay, a demography researcher at the University of Southern California. While age remains the biggest risk factor, more middle-aged adults who are not vaccinated are dying. Additionally, she said, high rates of chronic disease, obesity, and diabetes had not yet affected mortality statistics, but when a disease — Covid-19 — came along that had these as risk factors, “it was like lighting a match.””
“Most surprising is that declines in poverty, rather than stalling with the decline of the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerated. While economic conditions could have led to one of the largest increases in poverty on record, the federal government stepped in to support families as the economy ground to a halt. While the pandemic brought a new set of hardships, these federal relief efforts prompted child poverty to fall sharply: In 2020, according to the supplemental poverty measure, child poverty fell from 12.5 percent to 9.7 percent — by far the largest single-year drop over the previous half-century.
These declines continued in 2021. In figures released Tuesday, we learned that in 2021 child poverty fell even further, to just 5.2 percent, by far the lowest rate ever recorded. This means that, between 2020 and 2021, an additional 3.4 million children were pulled out of poverty, and over the past two years almost 5.5 million children were, as the child poverty rate fell by nearly 60 percent in just two years.”
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“it’s no great mystery how it happened. To stave off a recession and prevent a spike in material hardship amid widespread joblessness and economic uncertainty, the federal government temporarily reinvented the traditional US safety net, pushing cash into US households. There were three rounds of economic impact payments (stimulus checks), expanded unemployment assistance, and, in 2021, an expanded child tax credit, which sent modest monthly cash payments to most American households with children from July through December 2021.
While the traditional safety net targets poor families and relies heavily on in-kind benefits rather than money, the pandemic safety net was largely cash-based, unrestricted, and nearly universal.”
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“it worked.
Over the past two years, tens of millions of people lost work and had their lives disrupted by Covid-19. Yet amid this economic disruption, child poverty plummeted.”
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“An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that, absent government intervention, poverty in 2020 would have experienced its second-largest increase on record, but as a result of the pandemic safety net, poverty in the US experienced the largest single-year decline in more than 50 years.”
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“these programs were long gone before inflation became more entrenched. Inflation began in the goods-producing sector, as supply chain problems and rising shipping costs, combined with increased demand for goods, led prices to soar. Inflation was further spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on global energy and food prices. More notably, as relief programs ended, growth in demand did not appreciably slow. A quick look across the globe reveals that inflation has hit most countries in the wake of the pandemic regardless of the share of children who go to bed hungry.
While government pandemic spending has certainly played some role in pushing prices upward, it is important to recognize the uncertainty around the economic recovery. These same policies were responsible for the economy’s rapid recovery and swift employment growth. Following the Great Recession, unemployment remained elevated for years, to devastating effect.”
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“in the last two years, labor force participation rates have steadily recovered as the economy adjusted to living with the pandemic and showed no sign of accelerating as income supports expired.”
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“One pandemic-era policy is permanent: a change to the way food assistance benefit levels are calculated. This will reduce hardship and poverty going forward and should be celebrated. But most of the new Covid-era safety net has already expired, and we should expect child poverty to rise in tandem in 2022.
The clearest avenue for action, to relieve the current rise in hardship and ensure the lessons of the pandemic safety net are not lost to history, is to revive the expanded child tax credit. Most wealthy Western nations use a universal child allowance or child benefit — money sent to families with children across the income spectrum — to help defray the big costs that come with raising children and better ensure the healthy development of that nation’s children.
For the final six months of 2021, the US finally joined this group, and the results, as we now know, were staggering. Child poverty, child food insecurity, and other measures of material hardship all fell sharply. Critics feared the payments would provide a disincentive to work, but the policy had no discernible impact on the labor force participation of recipients. The benefits of the policy were extraordinary, and the downsides were negligible. We can, and should, bring it back.”
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“But what about inflation? Can we really send more cash to households while the Fed is trying to rein in spending? Data shows that low- and middle-income families receiving child tax credit payments in 2021 largely spent the funds on necessities, like food and utilities — the same necessities that Americans are now paying higher prices for — so the payments would go a long way toward relieving rising material hardship.
At the same time, a number of economists have noted that the expanded child tax credit is “too small to meaningfully increase inflation across the whole economy.” Perhaps most importantly, the government can help the most vulnerable in our society, even if it means asking others to chip in more to offset those costs. The Inflation Reduction Act begins that process by ensuring that the IRS can collect the tax revenue that high-income Americans actually owe.”